Hitting The Jackpot
by R. S. Blackout
Summary: A bounty hunter in the wasteland tries to eek out a meager living, before receiving a contract that could change the face of the Mojave forever. M for some extreme violence and vulgarity
1. Ch 1: Business

Ch.1: Business

_Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. _I hear my heart pounding in my ears. There is no other sound besides that of my steady breathing.

"Have you seen Rick? He was here a second ago." One thug to another.

"He went off to take a leak a while back." Turning, to look at his friend who stands across a fire from him.

I can't hear their voices – I can't hear anything, actually – but I'm so far away it wouldn't matter anyway. I breathe in, and very slowly exhale, bringing my scope to bear on the left target's head. I feel the wind buffeting my face from the right side, and very gingerly reach my hand up and adjust one of the rusty knobs mounted on the aperture. After doing so I turn the second knob two clicks, feeling the resistance of the worn piece of equipment, bits of sand wedged underneath the knob, pulling and scratching as I turn it. I inhale again, and gently squeeze the trigger as I release my breath.

A resounding crack fills the air around me. I'm at such a distance that they don't even hear the rifle go off.

The man on the left of the campfire is in mid-sentence when the bullet strikes his right temple, literally causing his head to explode in a gorgeous plume of red, chunks of brain, flesh, and eyeballs flying in all directions. The severed stump of his neck shoots blood into the air in pressurized streams, a strange substance oozing out of his esophagus. I watch this display with a morbid sense of satisfaction, and pull back the bolt on the rifle, a large, empty casing popping out and bouncing off the rock I lay upon, falling down fifteen feet into the sand. The second thug watches his friend's head pop like a melon in shock, his mouth hanging open, and blood spraying across his face.

I pull my eye away from the scope and my hand off the trigger, reaching down to my right and bringing up a pair of binoculars, which I use to scout the rest of the area quickly. The camp is set in an enclosure surrounded by rocks, with a fire and several bedrolls set about. Panning to the left, I can see the corpse of a third thug, around the corner and out of sight of the camp, his pants still unzipped from the activity he was performing when his life ended. The top of his head is gone, and I can see bits of gray matter oozing out onto the ground where he lay.

Panning back to the camp I see the other man, with his 9 millimeter drawn, searching the camp for any indication of where the shot came from. I carefully line up my scope on the moving target, who is now leaving the camp, his eyes frantically searching back and forth as he jumps at every shadow, his pistol brought to bear. The wind calms a bit and I manually adjust without using the knobs, placing the crosshairs just a tad behind him as he walks away, anxious and paranoid.

I fire, feeling the kick of the rifle against my shoulder, and seeing dust kick up off the rock in both directions. It takes a second for the bullet to hit, but my aim is true and the shot pierces his jugular, his throat, and then exits the opposite side of his neck into the rock behind him, leaving a fairly large chunk missing. The shot doesn't decapitate him but he now has a baseball sized hole in the center of his windpipe, and blood is pouring out of the wound as he raises his hands to try to cover the holes, his eyes wide with terror. It takes him a while to bleed out and I almost feel bad, because his buddies were lucky enough to die instantly, but I maintain a cool facade as I sit up from the prone position on the rock and place my elbows on my knees, simply sitting and watching him die from a distance. The wind starts to pick up again.

After packing my belongings into a beat up brahmin-skin backpack and slinging my rifle over my shoulder I walk three-quarters of a mile across empty desert to search the camp. Dark goggles cover my eyes, shielding them from the blistering sand that whips through the air, and a bandana covers my mouth and nose. I am dressed in a long trenchcoat with riot armor underneath, painted with a '08' on the collar piece. This gear is most frequently seen on veteran Rangers in the New California Republic but I've managed to procure a piece of my own, however morbid the circumstances. At least the President is safe.

It's almost night by the time I reach the camp, and I pause to look up at the setting sun before pulling my mask off and my goggles up and investigating the corpse of the urinating Powder Ganger. In the final throw of death he had pissed all over himself, and I can't help but laugh at the sight. I retrieve a combat knife from a sheath on my hip and reach down, slicing through the flesh and bone of the man's finger, throwing it in my pocket and moving on to the camp itself.

I repeat this process with the other two Gangers and also collect their weapons and ammunition, the final corpse containing a pristine 9 millimeter pistol still in hand and a good stock of ammo. I strip him of his belt holster – he won't be needing it anymore – and tie it around my waist, sliding the pistol into the holster with a full clip and the safety off. Pulling my mask back up over my face and my goggles back down onto my eyes I turn and look out into the desert, where a brewing sandstorm has just reached its climax. Gloves on my hands protect my skin from the flesh-tearing sands that are now swirling about in huge vortexes, and I begin the journey back to the Mojave Outpost.

Three fingers would net me a good little sum of caps, and that would probably afford me a meal and a bit more ammunition for my rifle, and at the expense of three mens' lives that would more than suffice. The thought makes the trip back slightly less arduous, and I finally arrive at the outpost where I am greeted by several NCR Troopers, all of them showing me considerable respect for the services I have done for them. They remember me as the hero who saved President Kimball by disarming a bomb, killing a Legion agent before anyone even knew he was part of the conspiracy, and popping the head off a sniper after he took a potshot at the President – and missed. Bad move on his part; if I had been in his place, the President would most definitely be dead. This makes me wonder how much Caesar would pay me to switch sides.

I shake off this consideration, and recall how eager the NCR is to pay me for doing their dirty work. Besides, I don't want to work for Caesar and end up in some slave camp in the middle of bum-fuck Egypt.

Ranger Jackson is inside the outpost, talking to a trooper at a desk, leaned against a wall and completely unaware of my entering the building. I tap him on the shoulder and he greets me warmly.

"Rico! Good to see you, I hope you have some good news for me." He says, and I nod, reaching into my pack and retrieving the fingers. He grimaces at the sight but also thanks me, and produces a small bag of caps which he hands over. "Those were some of the escapees from NCRCF, if I remember correctly. World's a better place without the slimy bastards."

I nod my head silently in agreement, and pocket my bounty. "Any other work for me around here?" I ask.

"No, I think you've finally killed the last few of those fucks who got out." He tells me, handing off the fingers to a female trooper who walks by. I watch her walk away. "I hear Major Dhatri over at McCarran is looking for a bounty hunter."

My interest is piqued, and, thanking Jackson for the information I depart, heading down the road towards the huge monument at the crest of the hill leading into the outpost. I stop just before passing it and turn around, locking eyes with a female Ranger sitting on top of the nearest building, holding a rifle in hand. We nod at one another in understanding and I throw my shoulder to adjust the sling of my hunting rifle, then slide my goggles on and begin the long trek back to New Vegas. Oh, City of Lights, it certainly has been far too long.


	2. Ch 2: City Of Lights

Ch.2: City Of Lights

I wave goodbye and give a warm smile to the traders at the 188 Outpost as I leave for Vegas, clearly visible on the horizon, the Lucky 38 a glowing beacon in the night sky. In my pack is a fresh stock of 308 ammunition for my rifle, and in my pocket a few extra caps I netted by selling some of those dead Gangers' equipment. I keep the nine mil, however, since until now I have been without a sidearm. My mind wanders to all the usefulness of the weapon as I reach and pull it out of the holster, walking by myself down a stretch of road towards the Grub N' Gulp Rest Stop.

The nine millimeter is in perfect condition, clean and maintained. Surely that two-bit thug must have stolen this weapon from someone else, because no Ganger kept a weapon is such good shape. I pop the mag and pull back the slide, catching the ejecting bullet out of midair, holding it in my hand while I inspect the rest of the weapon. A full field strip and reassembly later I am almost floored by how perfect the gun is. Every single internal component has been removed and cleaned. Whoever owned the weapon before that Ganger certainly was a professional.

Unfortunately, knowing the usual circumstances of a thug taking a weapon from someone else, this professional likely lie scattered around the desert in a thousand miscellaneously shaped chunks. "Mine now," I whisper under my breath, without realizing, while I simultaneously pop the magazine back into the weapon and load the bullet back into the chamber manually. The slide pushes back into place and locks with a loud _click_ and I grin at the familiar sound.

The sound of footsteps to my side catches my attention and I turn, but there is nothing but desert all the way to the mountains, so my attention turns back to the road.

Suddenly a strong force hits me from the left and throws me off my feet, sending me careening to the dirt on the side of the road. My vision grows blurred from impact and I can taste blood in my mouth. My instincts cause me to reach for the pistol on my hip, though the impact has thrown it out of the holster ten feet away, and I can only see the blurry outline of the weapon lying in the dirt while my hands grope around the sand, searching.

I feel an equally, if not stronger force impact my ribs from my right, and I find myself airborne, five feet off the ground and horizontal. I land on the opposite side of the road, tumbling down a hill into the sand below. I scramble to my feet, still unable to see and quickly draw my combat knife from its sheath. The sound of screaming can be heard coming from the road. The sound terrifies me, but I have heard it before. Nightkin.

Tricky bastards, with those stealth boys, and crazy to boot. They're fast, strong, and invisible, but not being able to see them doesn't matter, because for me the world is covered in a very thick layer of fuzz. I can barely see the outline of the hill I just fell down, and the imprint on the sand where my body impacted. I squint to try and make out any shape, and hear the sound of footsteps quickly coming towards me, though I can't tell from which direction. I'm hit from the right side this time, and I can see the blue sky overhead as I am soaring through the air, landing with a _thud_ back on the sand.

I leap to my feet and throw the trenchcoat off my back, realizing for the first time that my rifle and pack are missing. I can hear the Nightkin moving on the sand, walking around to my left, and the sound of its grunting and heavy breathing. I sidestep to the right, holding both hands up, knife in my right, held with the blade facing down and my thumb placed on the end of the handle. I hear the Nightkin charge, its footsteps fast and heavy, plodding across the sand at considerable speed.

I dive right, narrowly avoiding the charge as I hear the invisible beast plod past me and yell at the top of his lungs. At least, I think its a he. I've been wrong before. The Nightkin closes the gap between us, slowly, and I hear him grunt and instinctively leap back to my left. The sound of a heavy object impacting the desert floor fills my ears, and I consider how close I was to death at that moment.

The sound of the object whipping through the air again comes from the right and I duck, feeling the gust of air as it passes just above my head. I hear the momentum transition into another swing and sidestep quickly around to the left, and the object impacts the sand again. I sidestep quickly in a half-circle and grab a handful of sand and rocks with my left hand, throwing it in front of me. The sound of the dirt impacting and falling to the ground in front of me confirms my suspicions and I charge, jumping onto the massive, invisible shape, wrapping my arms around his neck from behind and clambering up onto his shoulders.

I thrust the blade down towards my own body but there is a force between us, and as the blade sinks into the chest of the Nightkin his stealth boy wears off, and I can now see the huge purple mutant I am on top of, blood oozing out of his chest. He roars in anger and tries to grab me and throw me off, swinging the huge bumper sword around, kicking up dust and sand in the air.

It takes some effort to pull the knife out of his thick hide but I manage, and proceed to repeatedly stab the mutant in his neck and face, sending blood and little bits of flesh flying everywhere. The Nightkin screams as I thrust the blade into his eye, popping it, and then finally shove the blade directly into the top of his head. The beast and I both go down and I am thrown off of him, sliding in the sand a good distance away.

I slowly rise to my feet, my ribs and head throbbing with insurmountable pain. My vision starts to clear but it fades in and out of blurriness. I feel my way back to the road and search to the best of my ability for my belongings, finally feeling my pack laying on the road, most of the contents scattered around. My hands grope around for a smaller bag inside the pack, though I realize it must have fallen out.

It takes me a few minutes of blindly feeling around the ground with my hands to finally retrieve the bag, and I pull out a syringe-type object and stab myself in the hip, depressing the plunger. My vision clears, finally, and the pain in my ribs is slightly reduced, though still very evident. I sit on the ground with my legs stretched out, clad in body armor with my belongings spread all around me. I begin to gather up and return everything to the pack, before retrieving my trenchcoat, my rifle – which somehow managed to land more than forty feet from where the battle took place – and of course, my knife. The disfigured face of the Nightkin brings me a sense of satisfaction, and I take a few bottle caps and a stealth boy from his pockets. The knife doesn't come out of his thick skull easily, but then again, it didn't go in easily either.

I retrieve the blade and wipe it clean on my coat, then look down at the weapon the Nightkin had attacked me with. It is a huge blade made of a car bumper, license plate still attached, and I think for a fleeting second what damage it could have done if it hit. Lucky me.

Bastard must have charged me when I was walking then kicked me while I was down. I spit on the corpse and return my knife to its sheath. What was originally a short walk the rest of the way to New Vegas becomes an increasingly difficult voyage, made so by the intense headache and multiple broken ribs I have.

I stumble through the Grub N' Gulp, garnering more than one odd look from travelers and the vendors themselves. I retrieve another stimpack from my doctor's bag and inject myself with it. The effects are meager and cannot heal the more severe injuries I've sustained, but it keeps me going for a while as I stumble down the road, following the wall of New Vegas past the entrance to Freeside, past the entrance to the Crimson Caravan Company, and all the way to the New Vegas Medical Clinic.

I literally fall through the doors onto the floor, the mercenaries who work as guards just staring at me. Of course, they don't get paid to help, just keep out the trash. Dr. Usanagi come out from the back and says something, though I can't hear her, then sees me lying on the floor. With the utmost calm she walks to my side and stares down at me.

"Jesus, what happened to you?" She asks, before finally crouching down and helping me to my feet. I sling one arm around her neck to support myself as she walks me to the back. I try to form a sentence in response but it comes out an incomprehensible mess of gibberish. Usanagi sits me on the examination table and begins to do a routine checkup. I feel comfortable in the hands of a relatively experienced and trained physician; the entire reason I even bothered to come all this way. She marks various things on a clipboard and talks to nobody, because obviously I can't respond.

"Major head trauma and too many broken ribs to count."

She walks away and comes back. I'm in a daze and the room is spinning, and I strongly believe I am going blind. I tell her this and she ignores me, helping me out of my body armor down to my underwear and administering a dose of Med-X. This relieves all my pain and makes the rest of the process much easier while she does her best to fix me up. I black out while she is in the middle of cleaning the blood from my side, where my broken ribs are protruding slightly through the skin.

I wake up in a bed in a different room, still in my underwear but with thick bandages wrapped around my entire torso. Blood is starting to seep through the bandages but they do a good job of keeping everything together, and though there is still pain it is bearable. My armor is sitting on a table nearby and I pick it up, sliding it gingerly over the dressing, fastening it snugly to my body. I slip both arms into my trench coat and shrug it on, holding my side with my left hand while I exit the room.

I use the wall to keep myself up as I walk down the hallway back to the lobby. Usanagi is talking to another patient at the front desk when I walk out, grabbing my bag and weapons from a locker behind the desk. She eyes me as I walk by and take a seat on the couch, waiting for her conversation to finish. Eventually she waves the stranger into the back and beckons me to the desk. She has a frustrated look on her face, and I respond with an innocent one of my own.

"What have you been getting into, Ricky?" She asks.

"Don't call me that." I say.

"You need to stop getting in fights with everything that looks at you wrong. You're in here every week with even more ludicrous injuries every time. One of these times you won't be able to make it back here so I can patch you up." She tells me, though the level of concern in her voice is far outweighed by aggravation.

"Okay first of all, Doc, he attacked me. Those Nightkin don't have any sense of honor, they'll slit your throat while you're taking a shit and you won't even know they are there." I say.

"Nightkin? What were you-" She starts, but I cut her off.

"Second of all, you aren't the only doctor in the Mojave, I just don't like having people I don't know patching me up. Who knows where there hands have been."

"Yeah, yeah." She says, then waves me off and looks away. I produce my coin-purse – or rather, cap-purse, ha – and retrieve fifty of my hard-earned caps to pay for the Doc's services. She takes them without even looking at me and I laugh as I wander out of the clinic, cutting through destroyed buildings toward New Vegas, where the Lucky 38 looms far above me in the sky.

I enter Freeside and am immediately accosted by three men standing next to the gate.

"Hey man, you're gonna need a bodyguard if you wanna go through Freeside." One tells me, oh-so-confident in himself and his ability to persuade unaware travelers of fake dangers.

"Hire me and I'll get you through Freeside no problem." Another says, wearing leather armor with a .44 on his hip, winking at me. I scoff.

"Fuck those other two guys, hire me and it'll be smooth sailing. I can push some weight around here, no one will fuck with you if I'm behind you." The last one says, easily the smoothest of the bunch, but still not of any interest to me.

"Hah, no one is going to fuck with me anyway." I retort, quietly. They all start talking simultaneously and I can't understand what any of them are saying, but I get the gist that they insist on me hiring them to protect me from the shady characters that occupy the small town. "Do I look like I need protection?" I say, pulling open my coat and showing the nine mil on my hip and the combat knife on the opposite side. This still doesn't shut them up as they try to make fun of the size of my weapon and my apparent lack of skill with it, as if they know anything about that. I simply laugh as I walk away, down towards the main gate to The Strip.

The walk is relatively peaceful, and I am only accosted by the criers for the Atomic Wrangler and the Silver Rush; no thugs want a piece of me today. I approach the gate and all the Securitrons whirl around, the cartoonish face of a policeman displayed on the front. "Move along," one of them says to me, and I ignore it, stepping over the mutilated corpse of a thug who tried to run past the guards and pushing open the gate into the Strip, hearing their voices calling out from behind me.

The road is buzzing with activity, NCR troopers drunk and stumbling around, Securitrons trying to get inebriated women out of a fountain in front of Gomorrah, a shady character trying to catch my eye from the darkness beside the casino, gamblers standing around talking about how much money they won – or lost – on the slots today. I keep to myself, and most everyone else does too, though most of them watch me curiously as I walk up the steps to the Lucky 38, past the Securitrons and through the huge automatic door into the lobby. It slides shut behind me, obstructing their vision.

I walk past two destroyed robots on the way to the elevator and press the button for the Presidential Suite. I'm free to come and go as I please here, and not only because House allowed me access to the building but also because I killed the slimy little worm the first chance I had. I didn't take kindly to his manner of asking me to do something for him, so I found his little sleeping pod and broke his scrawny neck. Fighting the Securitrons to get out was a bit more difficult, but they are all destroyed now and I basically have free reign of the whole damn place.

I exit the elevator and step into the main area of the suite, looking around at each of the open doors to the various rooms. I hear a mechanical whirring and the patter of feet and suddenly I am set upon by a half-dog, half-robot with a brain encased in a small glass container on the top of its head. He jumps on top of me – and for a moment I realize just exactly how heavy a cyber dog is – and proceeds to lick my face. I push him off with some effort and clamber to my feet, scratching the dog behind the ear and receiving a pleased bark in return.

"What's new, Rex?" I ask. He barks a few times at me, and if I could understand dog language, maybe this would actually mean something. Of course, I don't, so I wonder why I bothered asking him anything in the first place. "Good boy." I say, and walk into the other room, grabbing a clean cup and getting myself some water. I give Rex a bowl of his own as I drink four glasses in rapid succession, savoring every last drop of clean water.

Walking to the fridge I open it and examine the contents. There are a couple objects wrapped in cloth, various meats from animals I hunt, some boxes of stale pre-war food and a jug of brahmin milk. I grimace and close the refrigerator, grabbing a half-empty box of Sugar Bombs from a cabinet and pouring some into my hand, eating them as such. Rex sits and stares at me, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. I pour another handful and reach down to him and he eats them out of my hand, then barks and walks back over to his water bowl, lapping up more of the crystalline water.

I return the box to the cabinet and return to the fridge, collecting myself a few pounds of bighorn, gecko and giant ant meat, throwing them in my backpack along with a couple bottles of purified water. I click my tongue and Rex comes running to my side.

"Want to come with me this time, boy?" I ask him, and he barks at me repeatedly, bouncing up and down. "Alright, let's go." And I proceed out of the suite, Rex on my heels. He sits next to me on the elevator like a guard, his tongue no longer hanging out and a serious expression on his face as he stares ahead at the doors. I look down at the pinkish, healthy brain in the reinforced holder on his head.

I am reminded of back when I found him the new brain, a long time ago. He is now loyal to only me, and I suspect that has much to do with the brain, which came from a junkyard dog out by Novac, who was fiercely loyal to his owner, a kind old woman who has helped me out on more than one occasion. The same traits have been transferred to Rex, and he even has the same happy-go-lucky attitude that Rey had, though he is still a robot dog and most definitely not something you want to be on bad terms with. I pat the back of his head as the elevator opens and his tongue lolls out for a split second, before I begin to walk out of the 38 and he follows me, growling softly at the broken Securitrons lying in the lobby between the slots.

We both exit the casino, warranting more looks from passerby, who are always dumbfounded at the prospect of someone going into the Lucky 38, though at this point it doesn't matter because House is dead anyway. I walk out of the strip with Rex, past the Securitrons at the gate again, the same one who spoke to me before saying, "Thank you for visiting New Vegas," as I walk by. I turn and walk backwards to look back up at the Lucky 38 tower, shaped like a huge roulette spinner, lit up in the night sky. Rex walks next to me, his eyes scanning the street back and forth, his head held down low to the ground. I turn and walk straight again, out of Freeside and towards Fort McCarran, the old run down airport where the NCR operates out of.

_And hopefully where I can find some work_, I think to myself, noticing my cap pouch is growing a tad light.


End file.
